Tuesday, August 2, 2011

My New Life

An open letter to all my dear friends, old and new, valued colleagues, classmates, co-workers, neighbors:

The month of July has been overwhelming to say the least. I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I received an email on Independence Day from Mr. Ulf Van Anderson from the Cyber Lottery in the Netherlands. As Mr. Anderson explained it, “The online electronic-raffle draws was conducted from an exclusive list of 250,000 international emails accounts picked by our Electronic Random Selection System (ERSS) from an exclusive list However, no tickets were sold. After the automated computer ballot collection, your E-mail address emerged as a winner category ‘A’…” This means that I won €1,000,000! That’s something like $1,450,000! Exchange rates are very variable, of course, but that is a whole lot of money, and all I had to do was tell them my name, address, phone number and a few other trivial details. I could get a new lawnmower! The check hasn’t arrived yet, but these things take time. Then the very next day I got an email from FedEx saying that they had a parcel for me which was being held up owing to some little procedural detail. They didn’t explain why the email message came from Oman, but they did mention that the parcel contained a bank draft for $2,100,000 and a letter from my colleague in Ghana where the parcel was waiting for me. All I needed to do was contact them by phone in Ghana or by email, and give them a few personal details and a handling fee amounting to $210, and they would have the parcel in my hands within 24 hours. I confess I did not respond quickly to this as I do not know anybody in Ghana or even anybody who has been there, or anybody who has $2,100,000 to give me, but then I figured, what the heck. That’s a pretty good return on $210. I expect the check to arrive any day now and I guess I should give some thought to what private island to buy. At about the same time I got this sad email: “My name is Muhammed Azeem, Am the CEO of Al Muhad Contracting Co., in United Arab Emirate. I have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer and i have less than two months to live. I have been sick for almost a year now it has gotten worse. I want you to assist me to dispatch my wealth to a charity organizations. For helping me, you will receive 30% of the money.” Maybe he got my email address from the FedEx people in Oman. He didn’t say how much money we are talking about here, but he is bound to be rich as Croesus. He said to respond to a Japanese email address, so I guess he is getting treatment there, and is probably too sick to deal with this sort of thing, poor man. And then the next morning I got a message from the Obama Foundation offering me $500,000 just as soon as I supply the usual details. Well, this surely must be a trustworthy offer since President Obama wouldn’t dare lend his name to anything that wasn’t on the up and up. It is a bit worrying though that he would be using a bank in the UK rather than one here. Are our banks headed for the cliff again? Then, within 24 hours of this I got two more tempting offers: From Hong Kong: “Hello Friend, I am Mr. Si-Wan Park, manager on deposit and remittance in Woori Bank,Hong Kong.; I have a sensitive, confidential brief from Hong Kong and I am asking for your partnership in re- profiling funds ($15,557,210.00 USD). What I require from you is your honest co-operation and I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you and I from any breach of the law. Please accept my apologies, if I have encroached on your privacy without prior notice, keep my confidence and disregard this email if you do not appreciate this proposition I have offered you. All confirmable documents to back up this fund shall be made available to you, as soon as I receive your reply via my private email (parksiwan01@hotmail.com.hk), I shall let you know what is required of you.

Regards Si-Wan Park“ While it’s true I have no idea what Mr. Park is suggesting, still $15,557,210 is a pretty enticing lure – how could you go wrong just finding out? And then there was the second one, again from Ghana: “On behalf of the United Nations Organization, We wish to inform you that the payment Committee in-conjunction with the Overseas Credit Commission has been mandated to compensate all the outstanding Foreign Investors in the West African Region this quarter of the fiscal year 2011, your email and Particulars were discovered as next on the list (Category "A") due for payment of US$14,500,000.00 {Fourteen Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars} Only.” So I guess this must have something to do with my mysterious benefactor who gave a $2,100,000 check to FedEx for which I needed to supply name and address and so forth. And here they were, asking for all that information yet again. Unfortunately it seems possible that something might be wrong with this latest remittance, as I soon received yet another message from Ghana: “There is information I think might interest you. First kindly confirm if you are the owner of this email address. I am Mr. Ken Solomon, I work with foreign remittance department with a bank here in Ghana. I do not know if am talking to the right person, But I will like you to confirm if you are the owner of this email ID. But somehow I am not comfortable and too sure that I am communicating with the right owner of this email. If you can prove that you are the owner of this email ID, then I will furnish you with the information that I have for you, when I am convinced than I am talking to the right person and will proceed with you. I am taking this preventive measure because I do not want to talk to the wrong person because of the sensitivity of the information regarding the issue. Other details will be forwarded to you as soon as I am convinced that I am communicating with the right person,” While I was mulling this over, I received a message from Moammar Gaddafi’s second wife who got my email address from Moammar’s address book. I can only imagine he got it from Muhammed Azeem, that poor wretch with esophageal cancer being treated in Japan. Anyway, Mrs. Gaddafi proposes that she send me $40,000,000 that she has stashed away in an Asian bank somewhere. Then I will see to its investment in sound businesses in exchange for 30% of it. That would be $12,000,000. Fair recompense for an afternoon’s work, I say. By and by her son Alaa will come over and I am to help him set up a business. And all she needs to get this moving is the same information that I have been handing out to anybody that asks from all over West Africa and the middle east. In similar offers, both humanitarian and commercial, I have been offered

· £3,000,000 which amounts to something like $4,800,000 by a pathetic Greek woman who said: “I have decided to donate this fund to you and want you to use this gift which comes from my husbands effort to fund the upkeep of widows, widowers, orphans, destitute, the down-trodden, physically challenged children, barren-women and persons who prove to be genuinely handicapped financially.”· 30% of $19,500,000 by Mr. Song Lile, a credit officer at the Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong to “effect a transaction”· $15,000,000 by Mr. Chu-yu Soong, a retired operations manager of the Bank of China, Malaysia to pretend to be next-of-kin for a dormant account· $2,500,000,000 by a Finance Director of some bank in Lagos who says that it is there in my name and somebody name Newman Lazarus is trying to get it and whoever comes up with the $185 processing fee will be the lucky winner· Some substantial slice of $70,000,000,000 by Hashim al-Adly, brother of the former Interior Minister of Egypt under Hosni Mubarak who pilfered every dime and squirreled it away all over Europe. My role would be to receive the stolen goods and launder it.· £12,400,000 ($20,000,000, more or less) by Mr Roy Hill to provide respectability for a scheme which boils down to robbing the estate of somebody who died intestate and 35% of whose assets are offered to me. This is very similar to the above-mentioned proposal of Mr. Chu-yu Soong, leading me to wonder what Asian estate laws look like.· And finally, a stirring proposal by yet another Pitiful Rich Person, Sister Mrs. Melina Komol from Comoros Island who is circling the drain and wants to give me $4,500,000 “for the help of orphanages home, christian schools, widows, the less privilages and churches for propagating the word of God, according to my desire and my late husband before his death.”To make a long story short, during the month of July I have been offered, by numerous people I don’t know, in various capacities, in places I have never been, something like $2,596,256,815, offset by $395 in fees. This does not include the philanthropic and cancerous Mr Azeem from whom I am expecting numerous millions or the larcenous Mr. al-Adley whose munificence I am expecting in the billions. I’ll be worth more than a drug cartel. And so, when this gush of money starts pouring in, which should be any day now, I will have to put my old life behind me, buy new clothes, spend a month at a fat farm, do something with my hair, learn how to behave on a yacht, and how to address heads of state.